IF there were ever an appropriate occasion for a display of the President’s now-famous profane anger, it is the killing of 17-year-old Kian Loyd delos Santos on Aug. 16, at the hands of trigger-happy police.
In a spot report, Caloocan City police on an anti-drug sweep said the Grade 11 student opened fire at them first, “so they were compelled to return fire.”
But witnesses and CCTV footage tell a different story.
CCTV footage showed Kian, in fact, was dragged by two men—not in uniform—from one alley to another where he was told to run with a gun—then shot when he did so.
The teenager was found dead with a gun in his left hand—a telling detail, since the boy was right-handed.
In a statement Saturday, Malacañang condemned what it called Delos Santos’ “deeply regrettable” death, reminding law enforcement authorities “to be wary of the reckless exercise of power and authority.” This was in stark contrast to Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella’s initial statement on Friday that the boy’s killing was a “happily isolated” case in the Philippine National Police “one-time, big-time” anti-crime operations that have killed at least 69 drug suspects in Bulacan, Caloocan and Manila last week.
Authorities said the police chief of Caloocan City and the three policemen implicated in Delos Santos’ killing have been relieved “to pave the way for an impartial investigation.”
Senators, too, have moved to begin their own inquiry into the teenager’s death—although we question the effectiveness of such investigations. After all, didn’t the President reinstate a police raiding team that the senators concluded had murdered a city mayor in his jail cell in a sub-provincial jail?
So far, we have not heard directly from the bristly President Rodrigo Duterte, who last week congratulated police for killing 32 drug suspects in a day, saying if they could do that every day, we would be rid of what ails the country.
Before the President rushes to defend the Caloocan police involved, he should acknowledge, even if only to himself, that 17-year-old Kian was not a mayor implicated in the illegal drug trade. He was, by all accounts, a boy who helped his father run a small sari-sari store. Before the President promises to exonerate or pardon the Caloocan policemen, he ought to consider that the words that fly from his mouth end up as bullets in a dead, drug-free 17-year-old boy, who by his own father’s account, had aspired to be a policeman.
We do not doubt the President’s courage. We hope that he now displays that courage by admitting the police have stepped over the line and to let them face the full consequences under the law. And we hope he shows the same compassion to the Delos Santos family that he has shown to the families of soldiers and law enforcers killed in the line of duty.
